British Author Beats Heavyweights for Book Award

British author Penelope Fitzgerald was a surprise winner Tuesday night of the National Book Critics Circle fiction prize.

She defeated such heavily favored writers as Don DeLillo, Philip Roth and Charles Frazier.

“It was a very, very, very difficult choice,” NBCC president Art Winslow said after the ceremony in downtown Manhattan.

Fitzgerald’s win of the 21st annual award was only made possible by the organization’s decision this year to allow non-U.S. citizens to compete. Another foreign writer, Peruvian-born Mario Vargas Llosa, received the criticism prize for “Making Waves.”

Fitzgerald was cited for “The Blue Flower,” a historical novel set in 18th-century Germany. It tells the story of a young artist, later to become the poet-writer-philosopher Novalis, and his romance with a 12-year-old girl.

The book received strong reviews, but not the kind of attention in the U.S. that went to DeLillo’s “Underworld,” Roth’s “American Pastoral” and Frazier’s “Cold Mountain,” a debut work that won the National Book Award last fall.

Chris Carduff, Fitzgerald’s editor at Mariner/Houghton Mifflin, accepted the prize for the London-based author and said she had considered winning an “improbable occasion.”